Tap Your Power

Meridian tapping

helps you resolve your emotional and physical issues

Introduction

Welcome to Tap Your Power.
This is not exhaustive documentation for meridian tapping as there is
lots of documentation available on the web. Links below, but first
some housekeeping.

You are using this software at your own risk. I take no
responsibility for any results you achieve, or lack thereof. I also
am not responsible for any psychological changes that occur. Many
(tens of thousands?) people have experienced positive change by using
meridian tapping, but you might not. And if you have an abreaction
because you stir up repressed trauma, that is your responsibility as
well. You are taking control of your life, and that brings risk as
well as reward.

I'm all for self healing - after all I took the trouble to write this
program for just that purpose. And if you read around the web, you
will find stories of people who have resolved their own major
issues with meridian tapping - childhood sexual abuse, rape, ptsd,
relationship breakup, grief, allergies, agoraphobia, panic attacks,
and on and on. If you are willing to do the work and be persistent,
you can too. But there is no shame in going to someone who
specializes in dealing with major issues instead of doing it yourself,
if you do not feel up to it.

And please, I recommend that you do not start with your major issue.
I know, that is the one that would give you the most relief, so it's
the one you want to tackle right away. And sometimes that works - you
can find one minute wonders, where lifelong issues just evaporated
with a few rounds of tapping on obvious statements, documented on the
web. But I recommend you try the technique on some small issues till
you get comfortable with it, gain confidence, and find the style that
works for you. For example, the anger at getting cut off in traffic,
or the disappointment when you didn't get the recognition you wanted
at work, or the annoyance you feel for some behavior in a
relationship, or an upset stomach, or a fear of heights or ... If you
are still determined to go for the gusto, be aware that not all issues
are resolved as one minute wonders. Some can take days, weeks, or
even months. And there can be emotional pain while resolving them.

Even little issues, that seem trivial, can lead to large issues. I
don't know if you ever saw the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where the
kangaroo gets out of the carton. Sylvester Cat is chasing a mouse
which runs around a corner and between the legs of the kangaroo.
Sylvester races around the corner thinking he's chasing a mouse and
runs into the kangaroo, which gives him a thorough working over. If
this happens to you when you are working on something, keep tapping.
There is no need to say anything, or worry about which point you
should be tapping, just keep tapping until the emotional intensity is
gone. This might seem like a terrible thing to have happen, but you
can make phenomenal progress under these circumstances if you keep a
cool head and utilize the situation.

The replacement site of the
creator of EFT.. Gary Craig has retired and shut down his EFT
website. The above is the new incarnation of that website founded
with Gary's approval. It has many of the features of the old site,
including a newsletter, videos, a free get started EFT manual, case
studies, and a list of practitioners. There seems to be a
certification process available as well.

Some questions and answers.
These are questions and answers from a diverse qroup of meridian
tapping users. Some are naive, some are very skilled and experienced.
As with any diverse group, there is a broad spectrum of viewpoints,
backgrounds, and opinions. It is your responsibility to evaluate them
and their advice for applicability to your individual case. Another way to
use this information is as a test of your understanding; how would
you approach and resolve the presenting issue? This page
can take several seconds to load because it is very large. You can ask
and answer questions there yourself by registering at the new EFT forum site.

Background

What is meridian tapping (MT)? It is a means of releasing emotional
and physical stressors that generate unhappiness and dysfunctional
behavior. It does this by simply repeating a statement or statements
while tapping on specific points of the body. It isn't necessary to
believe that it works for it to work. However, you do have to
apply the protocol with intention. That is, you have to participate.

What does that mean? It means that you have to be focused and engaged
on your issue while you are tapping. You won't have much success at
resolving a fear of public speaking, for instance, if you tap while
you are watching television and not thinking about public speaking.
This can yield results as events on the screen trigger
responses within you, but they are unlikely to be related to your
issue with public speaking. Once you are aware of it, you might think
that the borrowing benefits process contradicts this, but it doesn't
really, as it is just maintaining the focus one step removed.

It seems like it could never work, but tapping is surprisingly
effective at removing all sorts of personal issues for people. You
can find many examples in the case studies above and on the web. The motto is 'Try it on
everything'. 'Surprisingly effective', however, doesn't mean
always effective. For my thoughts on this see the philosophy
section below.

How to Use the Program

To run a sequence, select the points you want to tap. Then go through
the rest of the dialogs and decide how you want to run your sequence.
Enter the statements you want to use while tapping in the statement
window. Be sure to leave a blank line between them so they are
treated as separate statements. Be as specific as possible, like a
writing assignment in using lots of modifiers. Finally, decide on
your distress level and enter it in the SUDS box. Traditionally, this
runs from 0 as no distress, to 10 as maximum distress. You can stop
the sequence from time to time and determine if this has changed,
updating the SUDS box. You might find that you have to change the
tapping statements as well because you have shifted to a different
aspect of the issue you are working on and so the statements no longer
hit the 'sweet spot' of it.

The official suggestion is to use two fingers for tapping. I like to
use all the fingers and the thumb on the more spacious points, thus
having a better chance of hitting the point and tapping the fingers
with the other points as well. There are pictures and short descriptions of all the
tapping points available in the program.

How hard should you tap? Have you ever drummed your fingers on a
table while you were waiting for something? That is a good level.
But people use tapping all the way from thumping themselves, to touch
and breathe (touch the point and hold it for the duration of a deep
breath), to imaginary tapping (tap only with intent, imagine you are
tapping or touching the point). Do what works best for you, and let
it change as it seems right. For example, when working with an anger
issue you might tap really hard, but when working with sadness, you
might tap very gently or not at all. Or vice versa.

For the wrist and ankle points it might be easier to rub or massage
them than to tap them. And for the top of head point, people
sometimes just move their hand in a circular motion above the head
without touching the head.

When viewing the tapping pictures, the green dot represents the point
you should be tapping on. The pictures of the tapping points are not
consistent as they are from web resources in the public domain. It is
surprising how difficult it is to find suitable pictures of wrists and
ankles.

By default, sound is turned on and the tapping points will be spoken
while you are tapping. The statements are also spoken during the
nine gamut procedure. The speech is computer generated, so if you don't
like it you can replace the files with those of your own choosing or
turn it off in the configuration menu.

The flashing squares in the left margin flash at the rate that you
selected in the configuration window.

If you are on a tapping point and statement that really seems to be working
for you, you can hit the space bar a single time and the sequence will stay
on that point indefinitely. When you hit the space bar again it moves to
the next point and statement in the sequence. This has no effect in the
nine gamut procedure.

You might notice that if you use both sides and random points, the sound and
image are flipped for sides. This is a relic of the way images are painted on
the screen, and is usually only on the first tapping point. I can fix it, but
the fix leads to other problems, so it is still in the process of being resolved.

The Nine Gamut is a way of shaking up or synchronizing the hemispheres
of the brain. When you are not making progress, or when you have made
a lot of progress, it is a good idea to run through it. This is
easily done by clicking on the button. You can end it at any time by
clicking on the nine gamut button again, or just letting it finish
will take you back to the tapping sequence you are running. It is
meant to run quickly, as that is part of what makes it effective, and
so the taps per action is low.

There is a Configuration menu that allows you to write a configuration
file, to select a default sequence file to load on startup, and to
select a default language to load on start up. These are the only
two configurations saved at this time.

If you are on linux the configuration file will be saved in your home
directory, ~/.config/tapyourpower/tapyourpower.config. On other sytems
it will be saved in the directory where the program is, where you
unpacked the program.

Using the language in which the events you are working on occurred can
be important for meridian tapping, as it might trigger the emotional
response more fully. Thus all the stress I've been placing on
allowing multiple languages - see the README file for a detailed
description of how to create a translation file. However, language is
sort of an add-on for computers, and so it can be difficult to get
right. In the case of Tap Your Power, changing the language will only
work properly on restart. Immediate language changes will be only
partial. That could change in future. So after you change the
language in the menu, you will have to restart the program to get the
full effect.

Information in No Particular Order

You can save and import tapping routines. Thus, it is possible to
share, borrow benefits, from sequences that others have found helpful
easily. Import them and run them. The mailing list is meant to be
used for that purpose, as well as asking questions and getting
clarification. There are some sample sequence files in the archive,
sample.yp, serenity.yp, and public_speaking.yp. The yp is the
extension for tapping routines.

Borrowing benefits is the process of tapping along with someone else's
issue and resolving your own. You first decide on an issue to work on
for yourself, you rate the issue for SUDS, and then you tap along with
the issue that someone else has, doing exactly what they are doing.
After they have resolved their issue, if you check the SUDS on the
issue you were working on, you normally find that it decreased or went
to zero. Your subconscious has performed a mapping from the issue you
were consciously working on to your own internal issue.

SUDS stands for subjective units of distress scale. Note the
subjective in the definition. That means that if you can't come up
with a true reading, you can just guess. And it will work
fine.

A program is not as flexible as a human being. As you gain experience
with tapping, you might find that you develop a more freeform style of
working on issues, sometimes called intuition, and the program will
become less useful to you.

However, it can be very effective for experienced people who are doing
a lifetime refactor, as you can
enter all the issues you are working on into the tap window and run
them on random points with random statements.

And if you are working on an issue that seems to be very integrated
into you, what could be called a foundational belief, you might have
to tap on the same issue for a long time. The program will spur you
to do tapping regularly - you can fire the program up every day, load
the file of the issue you are working on, and it will guide you
through the tapping for as long as you desire. Remember, if you don't
tap, you don't get the benefits.

The 'I deeply and completely accept myself' is called a statement for
psychological reversal, a fancy way of saying that sometimes things we
don't like about ourselves have benefits, and thus there is conflict.

The subconscious (where emotional learning is kept) is our keeper and
protector, always concerned with our safety. The behaviors we use on
a daily basis are there because at some point in the past the
subconscious decided they were the most effective way for dealing with
a situation we found ourselves in. We might decide consciously that
they are no longer the best way of dealing with that situation, but
until we can convince the subconscious that we will still be safe
doing it some other way, it will resist any change. So psychological
reversal is sometimes also known as resistance.

<soapbox> Let me say here that it is my opinion that you can't
be superbly effective doing meridian tapping (MT) on yourself
unless you have or develop a cordial and respectful relationship with
your subconscious. Yes, it is you, and it seems weird to talk about
being friends with yourself. Over the course of your life, your
conscious mind has grown. You can now give that opportunity to
your subconscious to modify and grow by working with it as a partner
or friend instead of as a boss. Lest you think this is way out there,
the same concept can be found in the work of Milton
Erickson with his training of somnambulist subjects.
</soapbox>

The official way to use the psychological reversal statement is to
repeat this only at the start of a round while rubbing the sore spot
or tapping the karate chop point. Only reminder statements are
tapped at all other points. Here, that is skipped and the reversal is
tapped at every point. Well, you can make it work the official way by
changing the statements if you want. I think it doesn't hurt anything
to repeat the psychological reversal statement at each point, and it
can actually help if you are reversed with the issue you are
working on. Besides, it is great to reinforce self acceptance. Just
that alone can lead to profound change.

Some statements that you can use for psychological reversal are:
I deeply and completely accept myself
I deeply and profoundly accept myself
I accept every aspect of my being
I accept that I can't accept myself right now
I accept the possibility that I might someday accept myself
I accept myself, I love myself, I forgive myself
I deserve and choose now to accept myself, love myself, and forgive myself

There are many more possibilities, and you might want to explore Pat
Carrington's choices method for choosing new behaviors, and Carol
Look's argument method of tapping which alternates agreement and
disagreement statements.

It is traditional to start statements with 'Even though', but you can
try 'Even if' or 'Despite' as well. Even just telling the story of
the incident as a series of statements can be very effective.

There are lots of other details that could be mentioned here, and
perhaps over time I will add more of them.

Happy Tapping.

Philosophical Ponderings

I say above that you don't have to believe that meridian tapping (MT)
works in order for it to work. That is true, for the most part. In
just the way that Newtonian physics is true most of the time, but
fails if you get to the extreme cases where it must be replaced with
Einsteinian physics.

So if MT fails to work for you, I see three possibilities:

MT can't work for your problem

MT can work but you aren't applying it with sufficient skill

MT can work but there is an underlying belief blocking you

For case 1: I think that this case is always either case 2 or case 3.
But in many situations, given who you are and the problem you are
experiencing, that might well mean that effectively MT can't work
for your problem.

For case 2: Our awareness, what we call I or me, is a very complex
system. There are all sorts of interdependencies and inconsistencies.
When we created ourselves as we were growing up, we grew like Topsy.
And we didn't always know what we were doing, just tried things till
we got a result we wanted. You can probably imagine how organized
such a system would be. So if you view your issue as a logjam in a
river, your task with MT is to remove the logs at the front of the jam
that are preventing the rest from flowing. The first log to remove
might not be obvious, so it takes skill to find and remove it. Of
course, it is always an alternative to remove all the logs at the
front of the jam. Those two courses of action are equivalent to
skillful short term focused application of MT or persistent broad
application of MT over long periods of time.

For case 3: How does this differ from case 2? This case is outside
of consensus reality, while case 2 still operates from consensus
reality, the realm of reason.

Chao Chou (Joshu) asked Nan Ch'uan (Nansen),
"What is the Way?"
"Ordinary mind is the Way."
"How do I get it?"
"To try to grasp it is to push it away."
"Then how can I know when I have it?"
"To know,
or not know,
these are still within the realm of discursive thought.
The Way is beyond,
vast and empty,
like space.
How can it be qualified?"
And Chao Chou was greatly enlightened.

This case is the exciting case, the case that includes unlimited
possibilities. You don't need to believe or even know about this case
to get excellent results with MT. But if you want mind boggling
results, you should at least allow for this possibility.

Case 3 presupposes that everything that exists is awareness,
consciousness, energy. And that if you can internalize that belief,
not just intellectualize it, but make it part of you, not as a thought
but as a basis of your being, you gain access to the forces that shape
reality and can alter them. A simple statement of this cosmology
might be that there is physical reality, and supporting physical
reality is a realm called the subtle physical or astral, and
supporting that is a realm called causal, and beyond that is the void,
given many names, but essentially everything and nothing, one in all
times and places. If you have visited or dwell there, you are called
enlightened (also known by many other names).

I recently read a news story about a man in middle America, I think it
was Missouri, who performed an astounding feat. He was dropping off
his daughter at school, when he saw another little girl, a friend of
his daughter, get run over by a car that was backing up. From the
story, it sounded like one of the rear tires was pinning her to the
ground. He didn't think, he just acted. He rushed over to the car
that had run her over, and lifted it until she was free. As I recall,
he said something like, 'I didn't think about what I was doing, I was
just completely focused on getting that car off her and so I lifted
and lifted until she was free'. Later, he said he had tried to lift
the car again because he couldn't believe that he had done it, and
wasn't able to. He said he had never before lifted a car, either.
What happened there was that he entered into the subtle physical, and
in that place amazing feats are possible.

So the limiting belief I am talking about in Case 3 is the belief that
we are only physical beings, and that we are bound by the laws of
consensus reality. We have been conditioned our whole life with this
belief, and it is woven into us warp and woof. Adding to the
difficulty is that it is reinforced by everything around us in the
world at every moment. The traditional way to remove this belief is
called meditation. Removing it is the purpose of any true spiritual
practice. MT helps in this process by removing the limitations we
have. Every time you remove an emotional belief or a physical
problem, you take another step closer to removing this belief as well,
chipping away at the foundation it is built on. Thus, at its base, MT
has to be considered a spiritual discipline.

When you read about the people who have used MT to cure their cancer
or other serious disease or disability, you might be skeptical. After
all, it doesn't accord with our beliefs and experience of consensus
reality. My contention is that they operated from the subtle
physical, often naively. Just like the guy who lifted the car, they
focused and intended, and bingo! the issue went away. And I am
telling you that the same is possible for you, if you just get to the
same place they got to. It is not all or nothing; every little bit
helps, and makes that realm more available to you.

Technical

This program is created using the programming language Python and the
GUI interface wxPython, a wrapper for the wxWidgets C++ library that
uses the native interfaces on linux, windows, and mac. I know that it
works on linux. And I know that it can work on the other two major
OSs, but I don't have a way of testing it. If you want to use it for
them, you will probably have to install Python, wxPython, and Pygame,
and then run it as 'python tap_your_power.py' in a command window.

In order to package a stand alone python application on windows or mac
it is necessary to run the programs py2exe or py2app, and these
require that you be running the OS you are packaging for. So it is
unlikely that this is going to happen any time soon for Tap Your
Power. Unless a user of those OSs does this and arranges to send me
the result so I can post it for download. That would be wonderful.

Linux is a different story. The distutils already present in python
will work fine to create a setup routine. So this will happen at some
point, probably as the software moves to beta.

If you want to have a translation to your native language in Tap Your
Power, take the messages.pot file included in the archive and
copy it to a file called tap_your_power.po. It contains all the user
facing messages in the program.

cp messages.pot tap_your_power.po

Then enter a translation for every string in the .po file in the
language you are translating to. These go in the msgstr entries, just
under the msgid entries with the original English messages. Once that
is done, if it isn't already installed, install the package
python-polib and open a python interactive session.

Now use this canonical name to create a directory in the locale
directory. Move the tap_your_power.po file you created with your
translations to that directory, e.g. ja_JP. Create a directory for
LC_MESSAGES in that new ja_JP directory. Move your tap_your_power.mo
file to that new directory. The next time you start Tap Your Power,
Japanese will appear in the language selection menu under
Configuration, and you will be able to select and save the default
language to be Japanese. To get the full effects you will have to
quit and restart the program after you have saved it as default, but
it will be the default from then on. If you have uncertainty about
the structure of the directories in locale, see the fr_FR directory as
a template.

If you do such a translation for a language, please send it to me and I will include
it in the distribution. You can also just post it in the Forums or
send it to the mailing list, and I will get it. I would appreciate it
if you would send me the canonical name as well, so I can create the
directory easily.

You can get polib from here if you can't find it anywhere else:
Polib home page

If you want to replace either the images or speech used with
Tap Your Power, you can just replace the files with your
own, using the exact same names, and the program will use
them. For that, using sound editor Audacity, Audacity homepage,
or image editor the Gimp, gimp homepage, might be
useful. The sound files are in the sound directory and the
image files in the image directory.